Simon Sze

Transcription

NAR: Simon Sze, 2014 Distinguished Achievement in Academia Diamond Award Winner. JB: I didn't pay a lot of attention to him until the first exam. I usually would set up an exam so it favored class average of 50% that way you got things spread out nicely, so I did that. Simon got 100. The bugger. So that aroused my competitive instinct and I thought, I'll show Simon. The next exam the class average was 30%. Simon still got 100, I said, okay Simon you can have your 100. He's just a very brilliant young man. SL: Professor Sze is universally acclaimed, everybody knows his name, he's extremely respected. YN: Such a famous guy but he is very very approachable. SL: Simon is a giant in the field of semiconductor devices, he's known for his seminal contributions. Invented what has become multi trillion dollar industry. NAR: Simon co-invented nonvolatile semiconductor memory, known as flash memory. Today, it's found in almost every cell phone and electronic device that uses digital memory. JB: It took a while for people to realize how important the floating memory device was. We really had to get to the point where we needed a device which would retain memory if you turned off the device. YN: Therefore you can just simply guess how much impact his technical innovations are giving in today's world. SL: 2014 the penetration of electronics industry by nonvolatile semiconductor memories invented by Simon is 100%. This is perhaps of the greenest inventions ever made because of the nonvolatile memories that are inside, it saves each user about a ton of carbon emission per year. JB: I've often thought if we've tried to do the things we do today in electronics with vacuum tubes, we'd have to run the coulee dam to run just the vacuum tubes. SL: In Simon's group at bell laboratories was the best experience of my life. I remember I came to Simon with an invention of mine, a transit time device. Simon examined it carefully and gave me sound advice. He didn't mention one little detail, that this device had already been invented and the inventor's name was Simon Sze. This I had to learn from others. YN: So he is known as outstanding researcher, and also teacher, and often viewed as a very visionary person. YN: Now the other side is his book writing. He always compare his book stacked this way and compared to his daughter's height. NAR: Simon has authored, co-authored and edited more than 40 texts and 300 articles. His book "Physics of Semiconductor Devices" is one of the most cited engineering texts with more than 40,000 citations and it remains widely used today. YN: If you study that book carefully from page one through the end, you know, you actually get almost all of the necessary technical knowledge which you need to be a semiconductor engineer. SL: My wife Nadia who also worked in the same great () laboratory, she tells me to show this book, this book is () the Russian edition of Simon's book, which was the only professional book which she took along when she emigrated from Russia in 1974. JB: He has that ability not only to write important books but to do important research, and to have the time and the intellect to do that, are really impressive. NAR: Simon's work has been honored both nationally and internationally JB: As an engineer I always look upon the academy of engineering membership as the real measure of your stature in the community. YN: The JJ Ebers award is a very prestigious award which is given to truly distinguished accomplishment under IEEE electronic device society. SL: Well all of these are very significant awards, especially the membership of the national academy of engineering. But I think these are... for somebody of Simon's stature, these are merely stepping stones to some colossal awards yet to come. Stay tuned.